


the universe next door

by oops_ohdear



Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Alternate Reality, M/M, Pining, Woke Up Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-28 23:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14459976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oops_ohdear/pseuds/oops_ohdear
Summary: Lovett keeps waking up in the wrong reality. For a given definition of "wrong."





	the universe next door

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gdgdbaby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gdgdbaby/gifts).



> 1) obviously this is v. v. fictional! obviously don't show it to anyone involved! obviously!!!  
> 2) i mean, MeanGirls_SheDoesntEvenGoHere.gif, but treats are the best and it turns out i do go here now.

It happens for the first time on the plane from Philadelphia to New York.

Lovett isn’t planning to sleep at all—it’s only an hour-long flight, and that’s the kind of shit that will screw up his sleep schedule for the next five days of tour. But the post-stage adrenaline crash from tonight’s Lovett Or Leave It is finally hitting; Jon is snoring gently in the aisle seat, a mouth-breathing example of better living through chemistry; and the cabin has the hushed quiet of an evening flight entirely sans children. It all combines to lull Lovett to sleep somewhere over New Jersey, and he only stumbles back toward wakefulness when the pilot comes on the intercom to say they’re starting their descent toward JFK.

Lovett blinks, and scrubs the heels of his hands over his eyes. 

“Hey,” Jon says from his right. His voice is still blurred with sleep and Lovett feels the same, like the half-hour doze has fogged his brain more than cleared it. 

“Hey,” he says anyway and then, habitually: “You snore when you’re stoned.”

He keeps his voice low, in case there are people who plan to sleep until wheels touch tarmac, and Jon leans across the empty seat between them to deliver his genius rebuttal.

“I’m not _stoned_ ,” Jon says in the stage whisper of someone who is absolutely stoned. “And I don’t snore. Lies. Slander.”

He doesn’t sound all that upset about the slander. He mostly sounds fond. He’s got his head tipped sideways against the headrest, cheek pressed to the fabric so he can point all that fondness at Lovett, which seems fundamentally unfair.

He’s smiling, too, close-mouthed and quiet. Lovett looks out the window, trying to clock how close they are to landing.

Jon reaches across the space between them and tangles their fingers together.

“Uh,” Lovett says. He looks back at Jon, just to see if there’s visual evidence of some kind of mental break. Jon’s expression hasn’t shifted a bit. He’s rubbing his thumb gently across the skin between Lovett’s thumb and forefinger. “You do snore,” Lovett says, because if you can’t rely on the script in moments like these, when can you? “Denial isn’t a good look for you.”

This is a lie. Very few things look bad on Jon, which is not something Lovett allows himself to think about under normal circumstances, and is definitely not something he’s going to blurt out just because Jon is holding his hand.

The plane curves gently to the left, wings tilting, and Jon squeezes, just a little.

Maybe that’s what makes Lovett glance down, or maybe it’s some kind of self-preservation instinct insisting he not look at Jon’s _face_ anymore, but either way he drops his gaze to their joined hands there on the armrest, and that’s when he sees the rings.

“Are those—” he says, his voice rising to a pitch that will definitely wake business travelers. The plane jostles in the air, some tiny pocket of turbulence, and Lovett startles awake with a half-gasp. He feels like he missed a step on the stairs.

Jon is snoring in the aisle seat, blissfully unaware as the plane circles lower and lower. Lovett’s hand is his own, not being used as some kind of very delicate stress ball. And his fingers are ring-free. 

+++

Getting from the airport to the hotel is blessedly monotonous. They’re all bleary from the flight, so Lovett doesn’t have to turn down any invitations to drinks or late night second dinner. Instead he says goodnight to Jon and Tommy (“rest up,” Tommy says, “we all need our beauty sleep for fucking _Radio City_ ”), and heads up to his room.

Alright, he thinks as he brushes his teeth, so he had some kind of very strange, very vivid fever dream, and in it he and Jon were the kind of people who held hands on planes and wore matching wedding bands on their ring fingers. That’s an embarrassing deep dive into his subconscious, but it’s recoverable provided he never thinks about it again.

He emerges from the bathroom, sets the alarm on his phone, and glares, with what he feels is justified suspicion, at the hotel bed.

“No funny business,” he says. “No weird dreams, no nothing. Got it?”

The bed remains impassive.

“Hmph,” Lovett says, and pulls back the sheets.

+++

It’s not his phone alarm that wakes him up the next morning.

He’s too warm, that’s the first thing he notices. Warm in a pleasant, weighted sort of way, but still, on the whole, too warm. He blinks his eyes half-open and toes half-heartedly at the sheets, trying to free himself from his bedding cocoon. 

“Are you trying to kick me?” Jon says.

Lovett does not yelp, nor does he fall out of bed, but it’s a near-run thing.

“Because I could go for another twenty minutes of sleep,” Jon says. He still _sounds_ mostly asleep. He does not sound in any way shocked, distressed, or even quizzical about waking up in bed with Lovett. He sounds like it is exactly what he expected. If Lovett were reading into it, which he is not, he might say Jon sounds faintly pleasedabout it. “Or, I mean, morning sex. As opposed to the kicking.”

“I have to pee,” Lovett says, and rolls out from under Jon’s arm. On a hunch, he gropes at the bedside table on his way to the bathroom and grabs something cold and round, along with his phone.

He does actually have to pee so he does that, and flushes, and washes his hands, and then sits down on the closed lid of the toilet. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, and the ring too. 

He should probably look at the phone first.

He looks at the ring.

It’s a pretty plain wedding band. Some kind of brushed something or other—platinum? Is this what platinum looks like? Lovett doesn’t consider himself a jewelry expert, particularly, but it doesn’t really matter what it’s made of. What matters is that it has _JF & JL 2014_ engraved inside the band in the kind of flowy script Favs probably thought was romantic. What matters is that if he tried it on his ring finger right now, he knows it would fit. 

He slips it back into his pocket.

Belatedly, he pinches the thin skin at the inside of his wrist. It hurts. It does not, however, jostle reality back into place. He could try something else—a cold shower or something—but he doesn’t. This doesn’t _feel_ like a dream. 

He did used to dream, occasionally, about Jon. It was embarrassing then and it’s embarrassing to remember now: you’re supposed to get sexy dreams about your straight, unattainable boss-turned-best-friend out of your system before you’re a twenty-something with a real career. And it had felt almost fundamentally unfair to get through a whole day without letting his eyes catch on the line of Jon’s jaw or the hollow of his throat, and then to get some kind of pornographic play-by-play behind his eyelids in the sanctity of his own home. 

(If he lets himself think about it—which he’s not, he’s absolutely not—his traitorous brain has already catalogued this morning’s details. The way Jon’s voice rumbled out of him, low and content. The warmth of his hand, the spread of it, long fingers splayed out across Lovett’s hip. He can stop thinking about them—he is, he’s stopping right now—but he can’t un _know_ them.)

But nevermind the embarrassment. Pornographic, that was the point. He used to dream about sex with Jon in any number of improbable places and positions, back when his day-to-day life was a constant overload of thrillingly important work, terrifyingly important work, and Jon. He never dreamed about waking up in the same bed, panicking, and hiding in the bathroom, sexless. Back then it was all just addled wish fulfillment. Hell, if this a dream—

He jabs, suddenly, at his phone screen, pulls up Google, and types “america president.” He’s greeted, at 4G speed, with a picture of their rancid fucking Orange Julius in chief.

Great. So he woke up, for the second time, in some kind of alternate reality where the only difference from his own universe is that Jon Favreau, noted bastion of hope, change, and straight New England frattiness, put a ring on it.

His phone starts shrilling its alarm tone, which is probably his cue to decamp from the bathroom and face the music.

When Lovett emerges Jon’s sitting up in bed, shirtless, sheets pooled around his waist, because of _course_ he is. Of course he’s sitting there, leaning back against the headboard, tapping away at his phone, looking unguarded and outrageously at ease in his own body—

Hush, Lovett thinks to himself. Stop _noticing_ things.

He looks down determinedly at his own phone. It’s flashing him an event reminder (“breakfast meeting with student organizers because you’re a MEDIA MOGUL who has BREAKFAST MEETINGS”) for the same meeting he’s supposed to have in his own universe. It’s also telling him his battery is at seven percent.

“God damn it,” Lovett says. “What kind of media mogul doesn’t charge his phone overnight? No, you know what, scratch that—I, as a successful media mogul clearly _would_ have charged my phone overnight. This is not my fault. This is somehow your fault.”

“We-ll,” Jon says, just that little bit drawn out. Lovett stares down at his phone, plugs it back in to charge and then sets it carefully back on the nightstand. He does not think about various ways Jon could have distracted him—not _him_ , other him, whatever—last night that might have caused him to forget about his phone battery. Lovett unlocks his phone, instead. He’s going to stand here, craning his neck down to peer at Twitter, until Jon gets out of bed and goes to shower, brush his teeth, put a _shirt_ on. Goes elsewhere. 

The bed creaks. Jon reaches out and curls his arm around Lovett’s waist. 

“Excuse you, I’m very busy and important,” Lovett says. His Twitter feed is telling him something about—

“You’re watching video of a kid hugging a chicken,” Jon says. 

—about, yes, a kid hugging a chicken.

“An inspiring interspecies friendship,” Lovett says. Jon’s shifted so he’s sitting on the edge of the mattress. He tugs, a little, and Lovett puts his phone down and steps between Jon’s legs.

Here’s the thing: this might be a cards-on-the-table moment, except that these aren’t his cards. Not exactly. He’s doppelganging in the life of another version of him, a version who is, presumably, happy with Jon, happily married, plain old happy. Honestly, messing it up would be a level of self-sabotage that’s a little to on the nose.

“I’m inspired,” Jon agrees, mostly against Lovett’s mouth. He lifts one hand to Lovett’s jaw, palm curving against his cheek, and kisses him. It’s a slow, warm kiss, lazy in its familiarity; Lovett turns with the gentle pressure of Jon’s hand, leans into the better angle. It feels like something they’ve done a hundred times before, and maybe that’s true for Jon, for this Jon, but it’s not true for Lovett. He doesn’t know where the feeling is coming from, the slow, syrupy ease of it. 

Jon pulls back for a bare moment, kisses the edge of Lovett’s mouth, the thin skin at the corner of his eye, and then leans in again. Lovett wants to sit down on the ugly hotel carpet in protest, or storm out of the room in his stocking feet, or climb inside of this moment, the circle of Jon’s arms, and refuse to come back out.

There’s an angry buzzing sound from the other side of the bed. Jon startles back, muttering under his breath about his phone, and Lovett jolts awake, alone, in his own hotel bed. He’s managed to kick the sheets away in his sleep; the room is too cold.

“Well,” he says into the silence, and rolls out of bed, and heads for the shower.

+++

The breakfast meeting is fine. Jon’s on his game, the way he always is when he’s talking to high school students, college students. He practically radiates hope for the future. Lovett can’t even get properly grumpy about it, because these kids _deserve_ it, so instead he has to sit there, and cram his mouth full of waffles, and try not to let his eyes catch on the laugh lines at the corner of Jon’s eyes.

+++

It starts to happen when he’s not even asleep: that afternoon he slips in the middle of an ad read and makes a dumb joke about the Moscow ballet that makes alternate universe Jon laugh so hard he tips sideways into Lovett, shaking against him, his breath puffing warm against Lovett’s neck. He’s got the same crinkles at the corners of his eyes that he does in Lovett’s own universe—well, of course he does—and Lovett realizes, with a kind of sudden, sick, rollercoaster rush, that in _this_ universe he could turn and kiss them.

He doesn’t do it, of course, but the knowledge that he could’ve lingers in the back of his mind even after he settles back into his own reality.

He falls asleep that night and only half-wakes up the next morning when Jon brushes a kiss against his blanketed shoulder, then his throat, on his way out of bed to take a shower. When Lovett wakes up for good he’s back in his own, empty bed, and he has to go interview Senator Gillibrand alongside a version of Jon he is decidedly not married to, pretending all the while that he’s got no sense memory of what Jon’s mouth feels like on his bare skin. Frankly, tour’s already tiring enough without that kind of added work.

+++

He tries to put it all out of his mind before the show that night. He’s at Radio City Music Hall, about to go onstage with two of his favorite people in the world, and as cheesy as it is, he doesn’t want to detract from the moment by lingering over ways it could be different. 

He can tell everyone else is feeling it, too—maybe not his precise sentiment, maybe not, “the only way this could possibly be more surreal and incredible is if I was married to one of my co-founders,” but the buzz is there. Elijah keeps sticking his head out from the wings to film the crowd, and Tanya’s double and triple checking everything. She’s actually the one who points out, as she hurries by to talk to one of the venue sound guys, that his mic pack is messed up.

“Hmm?” Lovett says. He twists his head in a futile effort to make like an owl and see his own back.

“Here,” Jon says from a few steps away, “I can—” and then reality stutters and Jon’s right there, turning Lovett with a hand on his shoulder so he can examine the offending tech. Jon’s so close, suddenly, so sure of his welcome in Lovett’s space. Lovett doesn’t even need to look down to know the ring is there.

“Look at you,” Lovett says, when the warm quiet between them begins to feel untenable. “What a good, strong provider. Did you hunt-and-gather this mic pack yourself?”

He means for the words to be just sharp enough to carve out space to breath, but somehow by the time they make it out into the air their edges have been sanded down, and Jon just huffs out a laugh. He’s the picture of careful concentration, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he fiddles with the wires. 

“There,” he says, a moment later. He drops his hand from the mic pack; he doesn’t drop his hand from Lovett’s shoulder. He doesn’t say anything else, either. He just stays. 

Lovett means to say something appreciative and innocuous. “Thank you,” for example, he’s heard that particular bit of hip slang is catching on with the kids nowadays. But everything else—the backstage bustle, the crowd outside, the pre-show nerves, his own good sense—feels muffled by Jon’s stupid _nearness_. 

“You take good care of me,” he hears himself say. 

He watches with a kind of dazed detachment as Jon ducks his head and flushes, pink and pleased even in the dim light. _I did that_ , Lovett thinks. He wants to kiss Jon, high on his cheekbone, and see if his skin is warmer, there. He wants to open his mouth and say a dozen more things, things he could get away with in this sideways reality, things he’s been biting back and burying for years. It seems so fundamentally unfair that this version of himself gets to say those things; this version of himself has watched Jon blush, and smile, and squirm about all of them, has made Jon feel good in this particular way and in a multitude of others. 

“Well,” Jon says, and then their ridiculous video game theme music blares, and Lovett startles, and stumbles back into his own universe and out onto the stage.

+++

Objectively speaking, he thinks the show is pretty good. 

Everyone has crazy energy from the start, just because of where they are. It might be too much energy at first, honestly, but they ride the wave. Tommy manages to call Jared Kushner a “morally and financially bankrupt Gossip Girl reject” within the first five minutes, which seems to settle him down, and after that he’s an increasingly steady anchor for everyone else’s nonsense.

Thank God for Tommy, Lovett thinks, because he’s at fucking sea.

It’s not the show itself—he’s making some good points, riffing on the latest Trumpian bullshit, and the audience is squarely along for the ride. But he feels like some internal mechanism isn’t latching properly; he can’t stop thinking about the things he’d get to say, on stage, if he was still wearing that ring. Things like, “Doesn’t Jon look good tonight?,” or, “Yell about the House Intelligence Committee some more, that was hot,” or something really and truly embarrassing, something like: “I’m glad you’re here.” 

He doesn’t say any of those things. He does say, “You really sold that, Jon,” after Jon does his best Hannity impression during a round of “Too Stupid To Be True.” Jon blinks at him, his expression shifting into something soft and undeniably pleased. It’s awful. And it keeps _happening_. The sound of it, Jon described in Lovett’s voice—even just these silly, small things—is intoxicating, especially when it’s coupled with that smile on Jon’s face. 

The worst of it might be towards the end of the night, when they do an audience Q&A. A very nice woman named Lindsey asks about politics in a post-Trump era and Jon takes off running talking about citizens’ investment in a democracy, rebuilding trust in government, rebuilding trust in each other. He leans forward in his chair, intent, all lit up with his belief in democratic institutions. It’s ridiculous, is what it is. 

“That was a good answer, wasn’t it? He’s good at those questions,” Lovett says when Jon’s done. There’s a shout of general appreciation from the crowd, and Jon tilts his chin down practically into his own shoulder in an attempt to hide his smile. It’s another snapshot moment that’ll float to the surface some day when Lovett’s awake at two a.m., feeling gross and maudlin, but he finds he can’t really regret it. For one thing, it’s true. And for another, there’s such a strange, unspooling tension that comes with saying it. He’s kept what he feels about Jon—what he could feel about Jon, and carefully doesn’t—bundled away for a decade, the tidiest thing about the generally noisy mess of his internal monologue. Somehow he didn’t anticipate that it would be quite such a relief, letting it go.

+++

They wrap up the show, thank their guests and the audience, and then stick around for a few minutes after. There’s a dude who’s made his very own “Pundit Is An Angel” t-shirt, complete with halo, so obviously Lovett takes a picture of him and then a picture with him; he poses for a couple of other photos, too, and chats with some people who have made their way up toward the stage. He’s aware the whole time, though, that Jon is—looking at him.

It’s a stupid thing to be aware of. Jon’s allowed to look at him. They’ve known each other for a decade, and they definitely haven’t spent that decade averting their gazes from each other like pale, consumptive Victorian heroines. 

But Lovett’s talking to a woman with a nose ring and a Friend of the Pod shirt, and the back of his neck prickles with some heightened _some_ thing. He waits until there’s a lull in the conversation before he glances over and finds Jon, across the stage, looking right back. He doesn’t even have the decency to look away now that he’s been caught—which is, Lovett reminds himself a little frantically, a ridiculous thing to think because it’s just _looking_. That’s _all it is_.

Jon tips Lovett half of a smile, soft and small, like Lovett just sidled up to him and reminded him of some inside joke, instead of caught his eye across the room. Lovett turns determinedly back to nose ring woman, but she’s said her piece within the next thirty seconds and he checks again, he can’t help it.

Jon’s still looking.

+++

It’s another late flight, and another absurdly short one, fifty-five minutes from New York to Boston. 

“We should’ve just taken the train,” Jon says as the engines rumble to life. They’d talked about it, and decided against it, and Jon had been firmly pro-plane at the meeting (“it obviously makes the most sense logistically,” he’d said, as if he wasn’t going to be miserable the moment he was confronted with the reality of air travel for the umpteen millionth time). Lovett feels an unaccountable swell of fondness for him, not for his former boss or his business partner or his unattainable best friend but just for _Jon_ , stubborn nerves and all.

Jon blows out an audible breath. He’s holding on to the armrest, and Lovett can see his fingernails biting into the fabric. Lovett wishes, suddenly, that another version of himself was here, one who would reach over out of habit and take Jon’s hand. 

The plane tilts up toward the sky. There’s a brief moment, the way there is on every flight, when the struggle against gravity is palpable. Jon’s eyes are closed. Lovett is the only version of himself who’s here.

Lovett reaches over, and peels Jon’s fingers carefully off of the armrest, and takes his hand. 

Jon blinks his eyes open and glances down at their hands. Lovett’s heart is hammering against his ribcage like it’s trying to make some kind of great escape, which, he supposes, is probably something close to what Jon feels on takeoffs and landings, so maybe it’s fair. 

The plane levels out. Lovett squeezes, once, and starts to untangle their hands. 

“Hold on,” Jon says, a little hoarse. He hates flying, Lovett reminds himself. That’s why he sounds that way. 

He isn’t letting go of Lovett’s hand.

“Are you—” Jon says, and then stops. He shakes his head, an aborted little twitch, and then says, low and earnest, “Tell me if I’m getting this wrong,” just before he leans in and presses their mouths together.

It’s a light kiss, almost chaste, their lips brushing together once and then again before Jon pulls back. Lovett glances down, instinctively, to check: no rings. When he looks back up Jon’s staring at him, his face open and expectant and more than a little nervous like he’s waiting for Lovett to, what, deliver judgement? 

“Alright,” Lovett says. His voice wants to climb half an octave; he tries to wrestle it back down. “What is this? What’s happening?”

“ _I_ don’t know,” Jon says. He hasn’t actually let go of Lovett’s hand, even though Lovett can feel how sweaty and gross his palms are. “You held my hand, you—”

“You _kissed_ me,” Lovett hisses, and then has to push back against the sudden sense memory of Jon’s mouth, careful against his; Jon’s breath, shaky against his cheek as he pulled away. Lovett’s spent the last forty-eight hours being caught off-guard by the universe, generally, and by Jon, specifically, and here he is again, only this time Jon’s equally unsteady. It’s oddly reassuring. 

“I like, uh,” Jon says, and then grimaces, scrubbing his free hand over his face. “This is so stupid. Obviously I like you, we’ve been friends for a decade. I mean that I, uh, I like you and I want something like this. With you. And it seems, the last couple days—I’m probably reading too much into things, but, you know. Nothing ventured nothing gained, I guess.”

There’s a pause.

“You talk for a _living_ ,” Lovett says. It’s surreal, almost, to have everything he’s been refusing to want since 2009 offered to him on a silver platter. Sitting here, hand-in-sweaty-hand with Jon Favreau, Lovett thinks: _Nothing ventured nothing gained_. 

Jon opens his mouth, maybe to defend himself, more likely to try again, and Lovett says, “I keep having these dreams where we’re married.”

Maybe that’s not the whole truth, exactly, but it feels like it should be more than enough.

“...Oh,” Jon says. “They’re, uh. Good dreams?”

“God,” Lovett says, “you idiot.” He can hear how fond he sounds, but he can’t work up much embarrassment over it. 

“Oh,” Jon says again. He’s smiling with his whole stupid, earnest face. “Well. I, uh, I guess I’ll wait to propose, but it’s good to know we’re good at it.” 

“You _idiot_ ,” Lovett says again. He has no idea what else he could possibly say. He tugs his hand free, instead, and gets a fistful of Jon’s shirt collar before he can object. He pulls him in for another kiss. Jon meets him halfway, still beaming, and Lovett bites at his lower lip because he _can_ : this is his universe, his Jon, and he’s entirely within his rights.


End file.
